Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Like most of all of us, when I stepped into my current position, I inherited my programs. My predecessor and her predecessor were great, great children's librarians and they served the community fully at the time they were there.

But.

There has been a ton of economic growth in this town in just the last year or so. And lots of new families are moving in. And I'm trying my best to offer fun programs that everyone has access to.

So. Recently I've added:

Toddler Time!!

I've talked about this some, but my storytime group has grown a lot. My "baby" storytime we've always done was birth-36 months. That's a HUGE developmental gap. It's not so huge when you only have 5 or 6 kids coming but in the fall I was averaging about 15-20 and it was chaos. So I split my groups. My baby storytime is now birth-18 months. My Toddler Time is 18-36 months (AND SO MUCH FUN), and Preschool Story Time is 3-5 years. So far, it's working really, really well. My babies that were really intimidated by the big walkers have started to babble and thrive in their own storytime with a much larger play space! And the Toddlers just love life. It's been fun to watch. Also this group LOVES anything that comes from Jbrary. Anything. Jbrary, y'all rock.

Family Story Time

This town has more working parents than its two nearest sister cities (we're all suburbs of the capital city but our towns are SO SO DIFFERENT), so I have to have more programs in the evening. Sometimes it's a drag, BUT I'm trying to make them a lot of fun for all of us. So I've started a Family Story Time, once a month in the evenings. Thanks to everyone on twitter and also Sarah who sent me some emails with some excellent information. I'm not going to lie. It has not been well-attended. YET. I'm playing with the times, and I've opened it up to 0-5 years. I just have a huge percentage of my patron base that have never been able to attend a single daytime storytime. And that totally bums me out. Even though this hasn't been a big success yet, I really have high hopes for it in the future. And I will take any suggestions y'all have to make it better!!

Middle Grade Book Club

We don't have a lot of programming that hits this "tween" spot (or whatever we're calling 9-12 year olds now), so me and my FT specialist came up with this. It's D's program, she plans and runs it. So far the books picked have been WHEN YOU REACH ME and DOLL BONES. It's in its infancy, but we're excited about being able to provide something specifically for our kids that have kind of outgrown our afterschool programming but aren't ready for our teen stuff yet. We're hoping this will be popular enough to launch more tween programming!

Any suggestions or concerns, as always, are appreciated. What new things are you doing for your library? Let us know in the comments! Link to your awesome posts!